Written By: Matt Hawkins
Art By: Atilio Rojo
Published By: Image
Holy shit is Samaritan Veritas wonderfully Top Cow. I’m almost 100% certain that this subsidiary of Image Comics are just fucking with us at this point, just daring someone to say, “Okay guys, come on. Let’s cut this out.” It’s like a group of children playing the PENIS! game on a bus, but the driver would rather just go into the ditch and hope for a massacre than to tell everyone to shut up.
Our main character—I can’t remember her name, so we’ll call her Batman since that’s what she wants to be—is an edgy new adult that is trying to exposition vomit more than Ashlar from Romulus. As of this issue, she’s succeeding. Romulus #1 had 12 pages of exposition, but Samaritan Veritas has it everywhere!
Go big or go home, I suppose.
Here’s what I know about Batman, straight from her mouth:
- She’s an orphan
- She’s a hacker
- She knows hacking isn’t as glamorous as the movies
- She doesn’t kill
- She’s angry
- She’s a good painter and almost banged a French dude because of her mad skills
- She likes gardening
- She likes being off the grid
- She knows what the Dark Web is
- She’s cool with references to old movies because that makes her interesting
Oh, she also wants to kill the president, who happens to be a poor allegory to Donald Trump. I’m not sure how she’ll handle this as she pointedly doesn’t kill, but I don’t really care.
To call it bad storytelling would be an understatement, but Samaritan Veritas doesn’t really seem to give a shit. The comic is content with rushing through a solid handful of plot points in its 30 or so page runtime, starting with exposition and ending there. At some point Batman puts together a team of mercenaries—all of which have nicknames based off of old movies because readers will think that’s fun—and then some other shit happens.
I don’t think it’s important.
Though to be honest, I’m not sure anything in this comic is important.
At least the artwork!…looks like every other Top Cow book ever. It’s serviceable in the most bland way possible. There’s a nice killshot at one point with plenty of blood and gore, but that only stands out as strange because all of the curse words are censored.
Remember kids, murder is fine but bad words are not.
Honestly, I wish these schlocky Top Cow books were just a bit better so they’d be amusingly bad and not just a chore to get through. I almost stopped at page 8, then again at page 14, and then again at page 20. It’s funny to see so much bad storytelling in one place in theory, but in practice it’s really just depressing.
